Episode 85: Remembering Tom Weiskopf with Phil Smith

Shortly after Tom Weiskopf broke with design partner Jay Morrish in the late 1990s he turned to architect Phil Smith. Smith had been working with Nicklaus Design in Arizona, but the opportunity to partner one-on-one with Weiskopf was too good an opportunity to pass up. Over the next 24 years, Smith and Weiskopf designed courses in numerous countries with most of their best work occurring at gorgeous sites in the U.S. west, in Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Their latest work, completed after Weiskopf succumbed to cancer in 2022, is at Black Desert Resort in southern Utah, a dazzling course blasted from a landscape of black lava outcroppings.

Smith joins the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss the potentially contradictory transition from Weiskopf the elite professional golfer to professional architect, the importance of playability and aesthetic appeal (versus “championship-style” designs), the evolution of the “Weiskopf bunker,” the almost guilty feeling of building golf in many of the pristine environments they’ve worked, designing good drivable par 4s and the courses they’ve built that best represent the Smith-Weiskopf design philosophy.

PHOTOS: Cover image: Black Desert, Utah (courtesy of Brian Oar); Above: Spanish Peaks in Montana (philsmithdesign.net).

Watch Derek Duncan discuss Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course, host of the 2023 U.S. Open.

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